


For Real

by BurningTea



Category: Leverage
Genre: Accidental Marriage, Multi, OT3
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-03-05
Updated: 2018-03-05
Packaged: 2019-03-27 05:43:55
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,675
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13874394
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/BurningTea/pseuds/BurningTea
Summary: Hardison may have made too good a job of faking some papers.





	For Real

**Author's Note:**

  * For [lynnmonster](https://archiveofourown.org/users/lynnmonster/gifts).



> From the prompt ‘Don’t panic, but I think we might have accidentally gotten married…’

Eliot wakes to the sound of tapping. Tap tap tap, like someone really wants their fingers snapping and their orange soda order canceled for the foreseeable future. He doesn’t bother to open his eyes or turn his face from where it’s mostly squashed into a pillow. He just moves right from sleep to snap. 

‘Hardison! Knock it off, man.’

The tapping pauses, but picks up again a little slower, like Hardison is mixing up volume and speed. The lack of a verbal response is odd. Warning sign odd. 

‘Hardison?’

Eliot opens his eyes, expecting to find his team mate ready to give him shit about the growling tone, but Hardison is still staring at the screen of a computer that was not in the room when Eliot went to sleep. Of course, neither was Hardison.

Pushing the covers aside, Eliot swings his feet over the side of the bed and tries glaring at the guy from an upright position. ‘Seriously, what are you doing in my room? Something happen I need to know about?’

Although if that were the case, leaving Eliot to wake up on his own was a weird choice.

Hardison sighs and finally, finally, stops with the typing. The look he turns on Eliot is hard to decipher, but there seems to be some element of worry in there, maybe even of panic. Eliot has seen Hardison flustered. Hell, by this point he’s seen him in nearly every mood the guy has: this particular mix of panic and bluster is not quite a match for any of them. 

‘Eh,’ Hardison says, ‘well, Eliot, what do any of us need to know?’

Eliot narrows his eyes. ‘What happened, Hardison? You got two minutes to tell me or I go get Sophie to mind-read your ass.’

‘Fine. But you ain’t gonna like it.’

Hardison leaves the desk and moves over to the small table at the other side of the room, where Eliot left his non-sensitive belongings the night before. Now, a carafe of coffee and two mugs have joined the bag, and Hardison pours a cup and holds it out to Eliot.

Eliot grumbles himself to his feet and over to the table, where he pours his own damn coffee, thank you so much, and quickly decides he’ll be making the next batch. Now that Hardison has given in, Eliot lets silence put pressure on him to get going, folding his arms across his chest.

Hardison flicks a look at Eliot and away, then again. ‘Okay. So. The mark went down, sweet and easy. Nate already called the job mostly done and Sophie’s off cleaning up a few last details. Gotta smooth over that mess we caused at the HR department.’

He pauses. Eliot doesn’t so much as twitch or grunt. 

‘Yeah. Anyway.’ Hardison looks down and seems to notice the coffee he’s holding for the first time. He downs it with a grimace and pulls a face before going on. ‘Thing is, I went into the records to, you know, tidy round a bit, and turns out… You see, if anything this just shows I’m too good, you know? I deserve an award or something, is what I’m saying. Not being kicked outta the window. Don’t even think the pool’s below this room-’

‘Damn-it, Hardison!’ He’s thrown punches with less force. ‘What the fuck have you done?’

Hardison holds his hands out like he’s trying to placate a wild animal, the coffee mug not helping much, and tries a smile. ‘Don’t panic, but I think we might have accidentally gotten married…’

Eliot wants his own award for not throwing Hardison out of the window. 

*** 

Sophie’s still wearing the fancy hat she’s used as part of being Mrs Esmeralda Marlowe, concerned would-be socialite who stumbled onto issues while helping organize a charity dinner. Somehow, it makes the tilted head and raised eyebrow worse.

‘Married? And without even letting me buy you a gift? Or drink a toast? Nate, I’m hurt.’ Her expression when she looks back at Eliot and Hardison is one of wide-eyed pain, and the hand pressed to her chest is a bit much. ‘Why would you do this to us? We didn’t even get cake!’

From his place by his room’s min-bar, Nate shrugs and offers one of those smiles that make Eliot want to see a warranty on the guy’s soul.

‘Can you delete it, Hardison?’ he asks, like it’s a minor inconvenience either way. 

Eliot grits his teeth and says nothing. Hardison, sitting only a few feet away from him on the same twin bed, holds up the tablet he’s switched to and points at a page of writing so small it’s amazing anyone can read it from two inches away, let alone across the room.

‘They filed paper copies. How was I supposed to know that’d happen? I can’t hack a filing cabinet, people! Parker’s gonna have to go miracle the papers outta there.’

Parker has the other bed to herself, a crowd of novelty fridge magnets surrounding her. She looks up from sorting them by color to crinkle her nose at Hardison. 

‘Why’d you get married if you don’t want to be Eliot’s husband?’

‘Parker,’ Eliot says, his jaw aching from keeping in the shouting he really wants to do, ‘you and Hardison are dating. Not Hardison and me.’

‘Well, no. You guys are married, now. Wait, do people still go on dates when they’re married?’ Parker looks at Sophie and smiles at the nod she gets. ‘You can date, too, then. Ooh, we can date together! I vote whitewater rafting. Two against one!’

She grins and points at Hardison, who shares a look of startled confusion with Eliot before making his own attempt to put the brakes on Parker’s latest idea.

‘No, babe, I am not going whitewater rafting. You don’t know that Eliot will side with you, anyway. You haven’t asked him.’

Which wasn’t the bit Eliot expected him to protest about. Okay, it was, but he didn’t think it would be the first issue raised. 

‘Anyway,’ Hardison goes on, sounding far more reasonable than he has any right to, what with being the guy who faked a marriage certificate so well it’s somehow become real, ‘me and Eliot being married doesn’t mean you and Eliot are dating, so it wouldn’t be the three of us dating. It’d be, like, me dating you and me dating him at the same time.’

‘That’s easy,’ Parker says, and she’s only getting more cheerful. ‘Eliot, we’ll date, too, okay? Oooh. Or…can you make me be married to both of you, as well? But I want cake at the wedding. A chocolate one. That sparkles.’

‘Parker,’ Eliot grinds out.

She rolls her eyes. ‘All right. It can have something healthy in it, too. Pineapple. Pineapple’s healthy.’

That’s a bizarre enough idea that Eliot almost needs to explain every way in which that is an insult to everything everywhere, but so far he seems to be the only one with a rational response to this clusterfuck. 

‘Hardison and me, we ain’t married. Okay? Some code got…got scrambled or something in all those little tech ramblings of his.’

‘Tech ramblings?’ Hardison asks, and, yeah, Sophie isn’t the only melodramatic one in the team. ‘All these years we’ve known each other and you call them tech ramblings?’

‘Something went wrong, man,’ Eliot says. ‘The us being married thing was meant to be for one day. One! And I still say you should have married me off to Sophie.’

‘No,’ Nate says. ‘Wouldn’t have worked. We needed Sophie single.’

Before Eliot can say anything else, Parker bounces onto the bed between Hardison and him, throwing an arm around each one of them and pulling them closer. 

‘Where are we going on Honeymoon?’ she asks. ‘Can we go on a cruise?’

Eliot pulls himself away and spins back to face Parker and Hardison on the bed. ‘We ain’t married!’ he shouts. ‘Okay? Stop with the…with… Just stop it.’

No-one follows him as he leaves, letting the door slam shut behind him, and that’s a good thing. It is. Means he can find some peace and quiet to calm down. Because being married to Hardison or Parker? No. That would be a nightmare. Both of them would kill him. 

Anyway, he doesn’t want to be married, to anyone. Definitely not to them.

Parker will lose interest in it soon, and Hardison or Nate will sort out the whole really being married thing, and Eliot won’t have to think about it. Which is a good thing. Yeah. 

*** 

The water at the lake is peaceful and Eliot sits on the grass, turning a rock over and over in his right hand. He can think out here. 

Problem is, he’s mostly thinking how the shock and the anger fading have left him feeling sad. Sad is something Eliot tries to avoid, but his options for taking his mind off it are harder to come by away from home and Nate gets sarcastic if any of the team vanish this close to leaving a place. The lake is close enough he can get back if they need him.

He hears footsteps behind him before she speaks, but he keeps his eyes on the water.

‘You here to tell me to calm down?’ he asks. ‘Because I got that covered.’

‘No.’ Sophie isn’t acting hurt any more. She settles close enough to him on the grass that he gets a breath of her perfume, but she doesn’t try to touch him. ‘I thought you might want to talk.’

‘Not really.’ He switches from studying the water to tossing the rock up and down, catching it easily each time. ‘Thanks, Soph, but nothing to talk about.’

‘Eliot.’

He wishes that with all of his training, with everything he’s learned, he’d ever found a way to defend himself against that tone in Sophie’s voice. 

‘Don’t,’ he says. ‘I said there’s nothing to talk about.’

‘Maybe,’ she says, and he sees her tip her head to one side from the corner of his eye, as though she’s considering a faint possibility. ‘If it means anything, I think Parker meant it.’

‘She’s with Hardison,’ Eliot says, practically before Sophie’s finished speaking. ‘Ain’t gonna mess with that.’

‘I think Hardison was on board with it, too.’

The splash of the rock hitting water isn’t enough to satisfy him, but it’s better than nothing. 

‘You trying to make me angry again?’ he asks, finally looking at Sophie. 

She looks back at him with sympathy in her eyes and it’s almost enough to make him run. He doesn’t though. She’s probably using secret mind-tricks on him with the shade of her lipstick or something, but he doesn’t run. 

‘No. No, Eliot, I’m trying to get you to think about why you were so mad. We’ve had to clean up records before. Even if this one’s trickier, Nate will fix it.’ She shrugs one shoulder. ‘If you want it to go away.’

Of course he wants it to go away. What is she rambling about? He opens his mouth to tell her that and finds his words are having no part of it. 

‘Come on, Sophie. You know that’s a bad idea,’ he tries instead. 

‘They want you around.’

‘And I’m around. I ain’t planning on going anywhere, you hear me? But that ain’t the same as all getting hitched. It’s… We’re not like that. Okay? It’s not like that. Between us.’

Sophie gives him a look and rises to her feet, brushing at her trousers as though there’s nothing weird about this conversation. Just a friend telling another friend he might want to be married to his two best friends. 

‘You know, for a man who makes such a good go at grifting, you can be a terrible liar, Eliot.’

She doesn’t say anything else, and Eliot is left sitting on his own again, staring back out at the water. 

*** 

Hardison looks up from the computer screen as Eliot walks into his own room. 

‘Hey,’ Hardison says, sounding wary. 

‘Hey. Parker around?’

He looks around the Parkerless room but by the time he looks back at Hardison, Parker is standing right next to the hacker. She looks hurt. 

‘Hardison says marrying two people at once isn’t what you might want,’ she says. ‘Because of you being traditional about some things. So…sorry.’ She really doesn’t sound like she knows why she’s supposed to apologize. 

‘Traditional?’ Eliot asks. He brushes a hand through his hair and takes a breath. ‘I strike you as the traditional type?’

Hardison isn’t typing anything, but he’s gone back to staring at the screen with his hands hovering over the keys, as though he wants Eliot to think he’s too busy to focus on him. His shoulders are tense. 

‘You? Yeah, man, I’d say so. All get a girl flowers and take her to homecoming.’

‘I used to kill people. For money,’ Eliot says. ‘Now I help you guys trick bullies into tripping themselves up. That ain’t a nine to five kind of life.’

Hardison moves his hands away from the keyboard, but he doesn’t look at Eliot again. Parker is looking. She’s staring right at him, unmoving. 

‘What are you saying?’ Hardison asks. ‘You’re not traditional, you just don’t wanna marry us?’

And Eliot had been going to avoid this whole issue until he died, he really had, but Sophie was right. That anger wasn’t about hating the idea of being married to Hardison, or to Parker. Or to both of them at once. It had been at knowing it wasn’t real, no matter how real some piece of paper somewhere said it was. 

‘No,’ he says, and rushes on when Hardison’s shoulder slump. ‘No, I mean, neither of those.’

‘You aren’t traditional like Hardison thinks?’ Parker asks, making sure of her ground. 

Eliot nods. Hardison turns around in his chair, not yet meeting Eliot’s eyes.

‘You…want to marry us?’ Parker asks. ‘Both of us?’

As she asks, she holds a hand out towards Hardison, who takes it and laces their fingers together. A show of unity. Of support. 

Eliot licks his lips. God, but this is harder than it should be. It took him long enough to accept this is his family now. Wanting something doesn’t mean it’s easy to take it, even if it’s being offered. Especially when denial has been so much easier up until now. 

‘Will you look at me?’ he asks, and waits until Hardison does. Parker squints, as though she thinks she needs to make it clearer she was already looking at him. ‘Do you mean this? For real? Both of you? Because this is not what I expected when I went to bed last night.’

Parker nods. ‘Didn’t expect to see any of you again after the first job. Plans change.’ She breaks into a grin and bounces on her toes. ‘That’s why you need backup plans. And teammates.’

Hardison stands, still holding Parker’s hand, and holds out his free hand for Eliot. 

‘You wanna be our official life teammate, El?’ he asks. ‘Because I am willing to bet Nate already has a plan that includes that.’

‘His plan better have cake,’ Parker says. 

‘I’ll bake you a cake, Parker,’ Eliot promises. ‘You, er, you mind if we try a date before we start exchanging rings?’

Hardison grins now, and Parker laughs. 

‘Not traditional, he says.’ Hardison wiggles the fingers of his free hand. ‘Sure, Eliot. We can try dating first. Sophie said she’ll need a couple of months to plan the wedding properly, anyway.’

‘Oh, hell no,’ Eliot says, taking a step closer. ‘Ain’t nobody planning my wedding but me.’

‘Our wedding.’ Parker holds her free hand out as Eliot gets closer. ‘But you and Hardison are already married.’

Eliot takes both of their hands and it’s his turn to smile. This isn’t scary. Now he’s admitted, more or less, the fact he loves them both, it’s not scary at all. 

‘I’m open to renewing our vows,’ he says.


End file.
